It's that time of year again—where line-of-business managers and company executives begin to lay out their business plans for the following year. While there has always been pressure to identify new growth opportunities, business plans of recent years have also targeted cost reduction and returning focus to core competencies. If your company sends high volumes of bills, statements and other critical customer communications, it is likely that you have already outsourced bill production and mailing (or at least considered it). The question for this planning cycle should be, "What new services can we engage a provider to perform for us in 2013?"

One opportunity that businesses should consider for 2013 is outsourcing end-to-end document-intensive business processes—also known as document process outsourcing (DPO)—and the fastest-growing segment in each of our latest document outsourcing market forecasts. Whereas traditional document outsourcing engagements involve the outsourcing of a task (e.g., printing, scanning, mailroom management) in support of a number of business functions, DPO refers to the outsourcing of a document and data-intensive process, composed of a number of tasks, in support of a single business process or function.

The characteristics of a document process are:

There is a specific input and a specific output. For example, the input might be qualified sales leads and the output might be a personalized set of promotional materials, which may include print and electronic components.

The process encompasses a well-defined sequence of activities, each adding value to the ultimate output. Following through on the above example, these activities may include data management, creative tasks, printing, web programming, email programming, distribution and tracking.

There is a well-defined recipient of the output. In this case, the prospective customer.

Most importantly, the specific business process can be named. To complete the example, the business process is customer acquisition.

Whether it is customer acquisition and onboarding, claims, application, loan or invoice processing, accounts payable or another document process, these business functions should be considered for outsourcing in 2013.

InfoTrends recently surveyed over 500 outsourcing decision makers at large companies in the US, Canada, France, Germany and the UK for a soon-to-be-released study, entitled "Service Expansion Opportunities for Document Outsourcing." For the organizations we surveyed, the top two business process challenges across all countries were cost reduction and increasing operational flexibility/agility. When we asked about the likelihood of companies changing their business process workflows and technology in the next 12 to 24 months, we found that 47% of respondents in North America and 53% in Western Europe planned to do so. Figure 1 highlights variation among particular business processes that respondents were familiar with.

While cost reduction was the top business process concern for the first three processes across both regions, the top concern for claims processing was customer satisfaction in Western Europe and resolving errors and missing info in North America.

While this is a small sample of the findings from our study, it is clear that many large organizations are considering business process change in 2013 and beyond. The question for you and your organization is, "Should that change be to outsource these processes?" If so, you will be gaining access to business process experts and setting your organization up for long-term, bottom-line cost savings. As you continue to build your plan for 2013, reach out to your current outsourcing provider(s) and ask them to outline new ways in which they can support your organization—you might be surprised by the breadth of services that your traditional print and mail providers are embracing today.

MATT SWAIN is associate director of document outsourcing for InfoTrends, the leading worldwide market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industries.